


The Iron Lady

by UnchartedCloud



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-06 23:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10346775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnchartedCloud/pseuds/UnchartedCloud
Summary: When a certain pirate queen begins to appear at Skyhold, Vivienne cannot help but take note.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pandamonium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pandamonium/gifts).



There is a commotion at the gates of Skyhold.

The sound of half a dozen hooves thundering across the stone bridge echoes even to the eaves of the castle on this quiet midwinter’s day, and the hurried pace it betrays is enough to draw you out onto your balcony. You know of no nobles due to arrive today, though that alone is not enough to rule out such an arrival; there is no end to the list of reasons that any pampered duke or comtesse could fall out of schedule on the journey to your mountain stronghold. Rather, what brings your wary eye to the courtyard below is the speed with which the party approaches, combined with its size. The Inquisitor was known to charge across the bridge on her overgrown nug on occasion, but she never traveled with more than three companions - and anyway, you know for a fact that even now she is up in her rooms, making plans for the coming dragonslaying fête with the ambassador. So who is arriving now, with an entourage of five bannered and crested Inquisition soldiers?

“Madame Vivienne?”

The unfamiliar figure - who bears nary a pierced eye on her person, but is bedecked with so many baubles that you find yourself wondering how many other piercings her body must bear - has just swung out of her saddle when the voice sounds behind you, drawing your attention away. The Inquisition’s seneschal stands waiting at the doorway, her ever-present hood drawn up over her hair and gloved hands folded behind her back. You close the book you hold in yours.

“Leliana, darling,” you say, and she takes your greeting as permission to join you. As she steps closer to where you stand by the balcony railing, her joined hands part to reveal a small, drawstring leather pouch. She drops it into your waiting palm.

“My agents were able to obtain the herb you were searching for,” Leliana explains, and your fingers close around the soft leather. It isn’t heavy, but the sides don’t give way beneath the pressure of your touch. “Tanner appreciates your assistance in locating the grove, and even took the liberty of grinding the leaves for you.”

“She has my thanks,” you say, and leave your book floating on a current of magic so you can open the pouch and peer inside. A quick examination of the contents leaves you to guess that Tanner has some experience with the preparation of herbs for alchemical usage; for a moment you wonder just what sort of smuggling Leliana’s young agent engaged in aside from lyrium.

But the seneschal has paid your gratitude little mind, for her attention has been caught by the group below. Her hood cannot hide the private grin that flickers across the corners of her lips.

“It seems our newest guest has arrived,” she says, and your eyes turn over the railing again.

“Josephine failed to mention that we were expecting any visitors,” you say, tugging the drawstring closed and setting the pouch atop your floating book. Your now empty hands come to rest on the weathered stone before you. “Who is she?”

“Admiral Isabela, captain of the Siren’s Call and the self-proclaimed Queen of the Eastern Seas,” the seneschal answers, and her hands fold behind her back again. “She is an old acquaintance.”

“I see.” On one lonely evening many months ago, when the madness of the world pressed upon your ears and threatened to shake your will, you had turned to The Tales of the Champion in a desperate search for answers. While the book had done little to explain the fall of the Circles in your eyes, it had introduced you to this would-be Admiral Isabela, the pirate paramour of Marian Hawke. You had thought that her taste in hats had been Varric’s invention, an ill-advised embellishment on his part. And yet there she stood, with a phoenix feather in her band and a brim so wide you think she must live in perpetual darkness. Indeed, it gave the demon’s hat a run for its money. “Do you happen to know the name of her milliner?”

“Why?” Leliana turns a small smile on you, amusement sparking in her eyes. “Are you looking to replace your damaged hennin?”

“Quite the contrary, my dear,” you sniff, and turn to collect your things from the air. “I should like to send a strongly worded letter.”

 

* * *

 

The admiral is in Skyhold for an interrogation, it seems - a fact which explains her retinue of armed guards. It similarly explains why it is she's here and gone so quickly; by the time the Champion leaves with the Inquisitor to Crestwood, Isabela is gone as well. It only leaves you with vague curiosity when she reappears several weeks later, however.

You have made careful note of those who have promised to attend the Inquisitor’s party, a myriad of Orlesian and Fereldan nobles all clamouring for a glimpse of the dragon you helped her slay in the Western Approach. Though the fight feels like ages ago to you - the burns left by its breath have long since healed beneath your salves and poultices - the excitement is fresh enough for them. Cleaning and transporting a prize of that size had taken nearly two months, and it was all the courts of Thedas could talk about for the whole of that time. Now they had arrived to see the great hall bedecked with the skull and horns and full wingspan of the creature, and Admiral Isabela had as well.

Normally you would have no reason to pay heed to so inconsequential a figure, but she is wearing a different hat that is just as gauche as the first. You do your best to focus on the details of reunification that you can glean from a drunken Duke Remache, but every so often that *hat* leaps out of the crowd to assault your eyes and you find you have to look. Which did not, in the end, go unnoticed by the woman who wore it. On more than one occasion Isabela catches your eye, and rather than be properly shamed by your look of bored contempt, she winks and smiles. *Winks.* You barely manage to control your expression, lest the duke mistake your disgust as something directed at him.

“You alright, Iron Lady?” The graveled voice of the dwarf catches you later, sounding somewhere around your right hip. You angle your eyes down to see him smirking up at you, a look not unlike the one Leliana wore on that morning shining in his dark eyes. “You look like someone slipped a litter of nugs into your handkerchief drawer.”

“I think I should have preferred it,” you answer, and sip from your glass of wine. “Then perhaps I would have something else to think about.”

“Are you so distraught by our pirate queen?” he hums, and indeed your eyes have settled on the admiral again. She sits with Leliana close to the high table now, but yet more distressing is the woman who sits to Leliana’s left - a woman dressed in the blood red and stark white of a Chantry mother.

“Distraught is far too strong a word, my dear,” you say, and leave it at that. Your sources have told you that Leliana has begun to take seriously her candidacy for the Sunburst Throne, that she has put into action machinations to securing a vote in her favor. You also know that, should she succeed, she would do away with the Circle of Magi altogether.

If anything has you distraught, it’s that.

 

* * *

 

“So I hear that you’re Rivaini.”

Isabela’s accent is lovely, you must admit. Certainly you find it preferable to the grating sound of Sera’s lowbred prattlings or Blackwall’s gruff grumbling, the sound of which you had decided to subject yourself to that evening. You had heard that the pirate woman would be playing cards with the Inquisitor and her inner circle that evening, and after having watched her handle the powerful nobles and wealthy merchants who attended the Inquisition dinners over the last few weeks, you found yourself intrigued. So far as you were aware - and so far as you and your sources could piece together - Isabela had no experience and even less interest in courtly intrigue. And yet, to watch her play the mesmerized marquises and besotted barons like so many easy tunes, you had to wonder if there wasn’t something she was after. After all, there is little more to Isabela than hedonistic self interest, to hear others tell it. Perhaps a woman such as her could be of use to you.

“The woman of whom I was born was from Rivain, as was the man she used.” The others have since drifted off. Once the Inquisitor stood and removed herself, her ambassador in tow, the energy for the game drifted off; now Blackwall had left, and Cullen had retreated to lick his wounds. Dorian and the Iron Bull still murmur to each other in a dark corner, and Varric attempts coax a drunken Sera from beneath the table at which they’d sat. Which left Isabela to pull a seat up beside you, and level what you’re certain is supposed to be an alluring look at you. “If that is enough to constitute being Rivaini for you, then I suppose I am.”

“And why wouldn’t you be?” She arches an eyebrow and drinks from her tankard. The firelight glints warmly off the gold and gems she has wrapped around her neck, and you think the gleam is almost garish.

“I was born in Wycome,” you say, and lift your eyes back to hers. She is still watching you with that look swimming in the liquid gold of hers.

“Just because you weren’t born in Rivain doesn’t mean you aren’t *Rivaini*,” she pronounces, and irritation pricks at the base of your skull. You have grown so tired of explaining this part of your history.

“Of course, but I was taken to the Circle shortly thereafter.” There is a flicker of something less warm in her eyes, but you do not spare a thought as to what it might be. “If there was a time that my parents taught me what it was to be Rivaini, I have long since forgotten it.”

“The Circle,” Isabela repeats. There is something heavier in her voice now, and you sense that you are on the precipice of the conversation you had truly wanted to have. “Kirkwall?”

“Ostwick. But I was in Orlais long before the rebellion started.” You watch her eyes with redoubled attention now, and carefully say, “You were there though, weren’t you?”

The bridge of Isabela’s nose wrinkles, and she drinks deeply before she replies. “Unfortunate business, that was,” she sighs, and sets her mug down on the worn tavern table with a soft tap of iron on wood. “The Templars just...went mad.”

That prickle of annoyance sparks to something stronger. “And I’m certain the blood mages running rampant in the city had nothing at all to do with that.”

Golden eyes narrow faintly at you. “They were keeping them like slaves,” she says, and her voice is harder than before. “The mages were protecting themselves.”

“Magic is dangerous, my dear. If left unsupervised, it can cost hundreds of lives - or tear open the very sky.” Your wine is nearly gone, and you lift the cup to swirl the dregs. You finish your thought before you finish it. “You saw the results of it first hand.”

“Even so,” she acquiesces, but you hear the rebellion in her voice. “No one deserves to be kept in chains.”

You think of Leliana as you set down your cup. “The whole world has gone mad,” you breath. Whether that was meant for Isabela’s ears, or merely a lament for your own, you aren’t certain.

 

* * *

 

The rumors spread in the following days. Isabela, the dashing, flirtatious lady pirate who had managed to draw you down from your lonely tower. The idea of it causes quite a stir among the castle’s inhabitants, and there are even more eyes than usual drawn to you whenever you leave your space above the great hall. These sorts of things hardly bother you, however; they will run their course in the coming week, and then be left behind in light of new gossip to be found. You have better things to worry about.

“Figures, fearsome, frightful, pressing against the dark.” Your skin prickles, and you become immediately aware of a dim shape perched on the corner of your balcony railing. “Wanting, wrathful, they call to me from beyond. I must remember my training, I must--”

“Be gone, demon,” you sneer, and flick a hand in the direction of the blonde man you know is there without turning. The pulse of dispelling magic barely leaves your fingertips before he vanishes.

The chill that takes you that night is much more difficult to drive off. The space between your sheets is electric, pricking you back to wakefulness every time you are about to slip into sleep. In those moments before, when you straddle the gap between your world and the fade, you see them. They have always been there, watching, waiting, singing the sweetest of songs and promising you all you could ever want in the subtlest, most innocent of ways - but with the Veil torn in so many places, and drawn so thin in others, they press much closer now. You can see them even before you fall asleep, feel them straining against the barrier between your worlds to reach for you. And the world no longer believes in the necessity of the Circle.

The way of life you champion is dying. In the dark, the fear demons tell you that your influence goes with it.

A ghost appears, unbidden, behind your eyes. In the wake of your Harrowing, when the spectres of demons chased you even in the daylight hours, she had been the one to suggest that the warmth of another in your bed could drive away their chill. And it had worked. After that was Bastien, and you had never since gone too long without someone to distract you on those most terrible of nights. Until he died.

You think of Isabela’s golden eyes, the deftness with which she - wittingly or not - played the Game. The admiral has been an agent of the seneschal for months now; between her access to Leliana and the alliances she has been forging during those Inquisition dinners...she wasn’t the worst candidate.

And if you have her naked, you may be rid of those infernal hats yet.


End file.
